Face-Slapping15 min read
Cold Palace, Hot Justice
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I remember the palace laughter as if it were another country's weather — warm crowds, rising banners, and a kind of light that never reached the room where I sat. My name is Delaney Vogt, but everyone in the palace used "Empress" when they needed a shape for my duty and a sound for their resentment. When my throne was taken, the title stuck like a bruise. People still bowed; the names changed where worship had to be shown.
"Delaney," Lily whispered, pulling a thin cloak around my shoulders. Her hands trembled as she fastened the knot. "You need to rest. You're shivering."
"I'm fine," I told her, though my marrow disagreed. "Does it matter? They already moved my bed to the cold wing. Even winter has more warmth than this place."
Lily Vasiliev — Lily — had been with me since before the palace taught me how to be a paper doll in jeweled clothing. She was my breath when I forgot how to be brave. I caught her eyes and gave her a small smile, the kind that wants to swallow fear for the other person. "Stay," I said. "No one else."
"There are the eunuchs at the door," she said. "We should—"
"They said the Empire needed celebration," I cut in. "They have their lanterns. Let them keep them."
A crash opened the door. Miles Dennis walked in like thunder — a wave of yellow silk and imperial command. He was taller than he used to be when he used to laugh at the ridiculous things I did. His face was carved into a storm.
"Out," he said to Lily.
"Your Majesty—" Lily began, but his next word broke her.
"Out!" he snapped, and she fell to her knees before any further argument could be made.
I watched him for a long, long moment. Once I had loved the shape of his jaw, the careless softness of hearing me call him "Miles" or "君临". Once I believed his promises like a child trusts a sun that never sets. Now his eyes had become sharp things.
"Lily," I told her, quietly. "Go. Take water to the gardeners. Bring me a cup when you can."
"Your Grace," she said instead, the voice tight and small.
"Go," I repeated. The small hope in her eyes steadied. She left, and the door shut with the sound of a seal.
Miles inhaled like someone who could not remember breathing. He stepped forward and grabbed my shoulder so suddenly that the cloak slid and I felt every bruise he had the right to make and did not.
"Do you think you can make me believe you did not orchestrate everything?" he said finally, the words hard as stones. "Do you expect me to pretend that the favors you took, the times you met with others, were innocent?"
"I expect no forgiveness," I said. "I expect the truth to speak for itself if anyone would care to listen."
He threw me onto the bed like a rough apology and left the rest unspoken. That night, the palace bells were chorus and the cold wing a tiny hollow where I counted breaths until the dawn.
"Miss," Lily said the next morning, waking me with a panicked whisper. "He didn't go to court. He slept here all night."
"I know," I replied. "And?"
"And he did not leave the cold wing. He said he would not go to court. He said —"
"That he would not leave me to die alone."
"Yes," Lily breathed.
When he came back to me, he wore the hesitance of someone trying on a gentler life and not yet sure the fabric fit. "Delaney," he said. "Do not call me that here. Not today."
"Why not?" I asked.
"For the court, I am emperor. For you, I am —" he stopped, searching "— someone who made mistakes."
"I never thought I would have to teach you loyalty," I said. It was cruel. His face closed like a gate.
He did not touch the marks that would later plague us both: the memories of a courtyard where two of us fell into ice water and I had to fight for breath and for care while he chose, who to save first. He asked no forgiveness for the past.
After that night, the palace turned on its wheels. Rumors gathered like damp cloth. Wild accusations swirled. There was a favored woman, Oceane Lawrence, whose laugh had once been a lifeline. She moved now like a chandelier in a storm: beautiful, dangerous, bright.
"Your Grace," she said one afternoon, much too sunny. "You should be ashamed."
"I am ashamed of no one," I said.
"Still, your maid spoke impertinently. She called me into a scene the other night. I thought palace life would teach her some restraint."
"I have taught my maid well," I said. "She is my family."
"Family?" Oceane laughed and the sound made my teeth ache. "What a peculiar word for someone who clings like a weed."
It was the moment that ended the fragile truce I had tried to weave with a rope of patience. I stepped forward, heat rising.
"Say that again," I said.
Her smile widened at the challenge. "You heard me," she murmured.
"You are vicious," I told her.
"And yet," she said, "so theatrical."
Those words fell into the hall like seeds. They sprouted into punishments nobody dared fan into flame because to touch the favored was to invite the eagle. Lily, who had always had the audacity to love me as a friend instead of a title, became the target.
One evening, Lily did not come to the bedside. I searched the cold corridors until I found the place no one wanted to name: the scrub yard, the junk pavilion, the place they put disgrace where it would not bother the parade.
Marie Chavez — the matron who had more earnest loyalty to the highest bidder than to any god — stood like a statue. Her face was a map to bitterness. When I reached out, I saw Lily sprawled on straw. The cuts were red, the bruises black, and the quiet in her chest was all wrong.
"Lily," I screamed, and a sound ran through the court like the throw of a dagger. "Who did this?"
Marie bowed as if to a king she did not worship. "Forgive me, Empress. It was discipline."
"Discipline?" I cried. "You will be answered for this."
"Who will believe the sack of the cold wing?" she asked. "Not the servants. They fear the favored."
"I will make them listen," I said.
They did not listen.
Lily died into my arms that night. I held her head like something I could fold into myself and mend. "Forgive me," I said, and it was not repentance that softened my voice but the sudden realization that forgiveness could not bring back a life because others had set the price.
Miles came to the cold wing when he heard. He arrived with a courtier's measure of grief and the roughness of someone tasked with state decisions.
"Let me help," he said. "This will not stand."
"Will not stand?" I asked. "Who will make it stand? You were there the first night. You let her die where she belonged."
"Do not say that," he pleaded.
"Say what is true then," I told him. "Say she was your guard dog and you let her be thrown to wolves."
He could not say it. He would not. The answer curled inside him like a secret.
Instead, he ordered herbalists and doctors. Javier Mori, an old eunuch with a face like worn leather and compassion barely stitched in, moved with the slow, clumsy kindness of a man who had survived too many storms.
"Empress," Javier said, coming close enough to touch my hand. "I will do what I can."
"No," I said. "Do nothing. Let stranger hands wash the sin."
He did his duty anyway, and while Lily's last breath had no answer, mine had an idea take root like iron: If the court would not deliver justice, I would coax it into truth myself. Evidence, witnesses, truth — they might be poisoned by fear, but fear can be broken in the open light.
"Who benefits?" I asked myself at night, cradling ashes and memories and the stubborn ache of a heart that would not stop.
Oceane had always smiled at me as if hunger made her prettier. She moved in the amber light as if everything in the palace passed under her orbit. And when my father, Franklin Weber, returned at word of Lily's death, a brand slipped across our world: he was accused of treason.
"My father is a soldier," I told anyone who would listen. "He taught me to stand. He is no traitor."
"Evidence is evidence," Miles said, as if the words could be planted in a place that would grow meaning.
My father stood before the court with armor on his shoulders and the dirt of a thousand campaigns in the creases of his hands. I wanted to tear the walls down around him and braid them into a rope to drag back those who manufactured a guilt they had not earned.
"Why would you lie?" I asked, face flushed.
"Because your father is everything the court envies," Oceane purred at me on the day the edict came. "He has soldiers. He has loyalty. He has friends in pockets you cannot imagine."
"Is this your work?" I asked.
Her smile was calmed into a flat surface. "Am I a cruel woman if I want to be the only light by his side?"
You can twist the world in a thousand clever knots when you have mouths that flatter in the right ears. Miles struggled between two truths: the empire's need for a ruler who could be cold and the man in my history who had promised me forever. He could not have both without harm.
"Do you regret it?" I wanted to ask him.
He could not answer.
The arrest came like rain that turns a lane into mud. By the time I reached the courtyard, the men had taken him. Franklin Weber — my father — was hauled by men whose faces had been paid to be stern. I watched him lifted high on the scaffold where justice would soon be a public thing for everyone to see.
"Do not," I said to the court, but my voice was brittle and small.
Miles approached me, and for one raw second I saw the small boy I had once helped to stand. "Delaney," he said. "This is not what I wanted."
"Then let him go," I told him.
"Do you want me to defy the court?" he asked.
"Do you want me to live with the man who took my daughter and the man who took my father both?"
There is no answer to that question that does not draw blood.
They dragged my father to the execution ground. The crowds pressed like a tide. I had tried to rally officials, to pull threads loose, to show letters that proved that enemy hands manipulated the paper trail, but official allegiance to the favored was as thick as old silk. They would not stand for me.
"Please," I begged the judges, one by one. "Test the evidence again. Hear the men who saw him from the border."
"This is the imperial will," one of them said. "The emperor has judged."
The hanging, the display, the way a man's life can become a cautionary tale — they performed it all with courtly precision. They gave no place for the truth to breathe. Franklin Weber died with my name on a prayer in his lips and the world tilted like a cup spilling its tea.
"When it is done," Miles told me, "we move forward."
"Forward," I repeated as if it were a sickness.
Grief burned like ice in my veins, but anger makes a calm face. I learned to breathe. I learned to place my steps where vengeance could walk behind me like a shadow. I stopped pleading with people who would not listen.
I began to collect small, dishonest things: receipts, servants' whisperings, the memory of a late-night guard who had seen too much and stayed in his bed to keep a promise. I found a compass of justice in the smallest corners.
"Do you think you can take the court alone?" Lily — I still wanted to say — "but she is gone."
"Do not mourn me like I'm a lost cause," I told myself. "Instead, wrench the truth from the jaws of those who would eat it."
I wrote letters in secret and sent them on secret wings. I found Baltasar Olson — the Emperor's uncle — and what he gave in return was not power but a promise.
"Keep him safe," I told him of my father. "Or help me show what happened."
"Your courage has not been a cheap ornament, Delaney," he said, quietly. "If I interfere, I had better be sure we will not all drown."
We would need a moment to break her: Oceane Lawrence would need to be exposed.
There are ways to make the palace a theater. It is full of nobles and gossip, and each smile is a lamp that can be snuffed or set to blaze. I plotted a day when the great hall would be filled with feast and song — a day when their eyes would be on Miles and not me. I purchased no torches for the night. Instead, I brought a quiet, relentless truth into the room.
"You are sure?" Baltasar asked before he left.
"I'm sure," I said. "If there is any chance to make the truth public, do it when everyone stares at the emperor."
The plan was a quiet one and heavy with risk. I had compiled a ledger of the favored's dealings, the names of bribes and the dates where favors had been bought. I had a steward who had not forgotten what happiness felt like when Lily had been alive. I had a soldier who had chosen to remember the right things.
On the day I chose, the hall smelled of roses and savory meat. Miles sat at the head, pale and courtly. Oceane wore a crown of pearls like a promise. My heart drummed like a small horse. I walked in, formally, as if to beg for mercy. Instead, I took a seat where I could watch their faces.
"Your Majesty," I said. "If I may speak."
"You may," Miles said.
"Then, I will speak aloud what was done in darkness."
"Delaney—" he began, something like alarm in his voice.
"Listen," I said. "Witnesses, come forward."
The chambers fell into a hush. I had arranged the players: the steward who had kept his conscience wrapped around his ribs, Marie Chavez who had weighed comfort over horror until she choked on both, and Caroline Garza — a maid in Oceane's retinue who had been bought with one too many lies. They came forward, one by one, with hands that trembled but faces that would not be fooled.
"Do you swear to speak the truth?" I asked.
"Yes," the steward said.
"Do you swear that the bribes and threats came from the favored, Oceane?" Baltasar asked in a voice like wood.
"I do," Caroline said, and the names began to fall like chimes. Documents were produced, neat and disgraced: a ledger of gifts, a list of orders she had transmitted, a note in her own hand that commanded Marie to discipline Lily for offenses she had never committed.
Oceane's face was like a mask melting in heat. Her voice was silk as always: "These are lies."
"You bought their silence," I said, calmly.
"No," she sneered. "This is treachery."
"Who benefits?" I asked loudly. "You have a favored's ears, and you wanted a throne. Who had the most to gain when the general was removed?"
"Miles, answer her," she hissed. "Tell them she lies."
Miles looked at me over the cups. He had been a kindness, and he had been a wound. Fear flickered behind his eyes.
"My lord," I addressed the assembly, "if this is not dealt with here, in the open, with witnesses and the Emperor listening, then the court will keep eating the weak. The man who killed Lily is not the only murderer. Those who set the trap deserve public accounting."
The hush broke like glass. People murmured and shifted. The steward, trembling, came forward with a sheaf of papers—Imperial recipients recorded where favors had been funneled. Caroline recited the nights she had been bribed. Marie described the way a whip had been applied to a young girl's back.
Oceane's face changed through the spectacle: first she was cool, confident as a queen; then surprise; then fury; then denial; then collapse.
"No!" she cried at one point, when the ledger placed her hands in the deed. "You cannot! I commanded no one to hurt her! I would never—"
"You said you would take what you wanted," the steward said. "You told us it was for the future. You told us the Empire would bow. For money, you said, for place."
"You lie," she gasped, the airs failing.
The crowd closed in like a tide.
"Oceane Lawrence," Baltasar said, "step forward."
She did, trembling. At first there were murmurs of sympathy — a favored consort? But the ledger and the witnesses had removed the mask.
"How dare you!" she cried. "My hands are clean!"
"Then kneel and answer the charges," Baltasar commanded.
Pride turned into performance. She hurled a dozen words at me, and each one sounded like a last attempt to twist the story. She was at first smug, arms outstretched as if to say she owned the room. When the ledger was laid before Miles, her smile faltered.
"Stop this!" she screamed at him. "You cannot let them—"
A collective breath from the court was a blade. With every acknowledgment, Oceane's posture collapsed a little more. She began to plead, then deny, then scream, then finally beg.
"Never," she cried, her voice caught in the throat of the hall. "I did not order them! I—please — please—"
"Look at yourselves," I said, intentionally soft. "Look at the faces who would have you rule. They are the ones you hurt."
The crowd's reaction was a thing I had learned to stoke: outrage can be a blade if you show it direction. Voices rose and fell and then rose again. Someone in the back of the hall began to sob. A woman near the dais took out a hand and fanned herself as if to stop the heat. A dozen noblemen leaned forward with eyes like knives, no longer content to let a favored dictate justice.
Oceane was losing her footing. She began the required pattern of denials that falter into a shaky, breathless panic.
"No! It's false!" she gasped. "It's a conspiracy! You will see — they made it up!"
A murmur swept the hall: "Made up? Then show your proof." They circled like hawks that have found a broken wing.
"Bring the guards," Miles said quietly. "Stand back."
The court guards moved to take her. It was public now, and justice would be measured not by whispers but by the weight of witnesses and the clatter of evidence. They took her arm.
She staggered. The smugness was gone. Shock cut her open. Denial hardened into a bitter curl. Then, as the reality enclosed her, she crumbled.
"You're all monsters!" she shrieked. "You have no idea what you took from me!"
"No," I said. "We saw what you took."
Their punishment happened in full view. I gave the order for the court to decide — for a punishment that the law could not call excessive because the law had been twisted enough as it was. The court agreed, and the chamber emptied into the square.
I had insisted on a public reckoning because a private death had stolen from us the chance to set right. This would be public. It would have to hurt.
They brought Oceane to the square where crowds had gathered. People craned forward. There were those who had once courted her and those who had been trampled by her ambition. Word had flown faster than the flags.
At first she stood tall in the sunlight which was unkind as truth. Her steps were practiced, the composure feigned from a lifetime playing a role. Then the bells began to ring and the punishments were read out like scripture.
"By the will of the court, for causing a servant's death, for abuse of imperial favor, and for suborning evidence against an innocent man," the herald said, voice steady as iron, "Oceane Lawrence is to be stripped of titles, publicly flogged before the crowd, and sent to the border as a servant for a span of years. Let the people judge."
I watched her face move through the stages I had expected and those I had not. Her first look was of arrogant amusement. Then curiosity. Then shock. A sneer hardened and she raised her chin, mouthing something too faint for the crowd to catch. When the first lash struck, her composure shattered.
The flogging was not to kill her. We wanted the emotion, the story: the favored who ordered death would be seen broken. The whip cracked with a sound like a tree limb. The crowd sucked in a breath and then some dared to cheer. She slumped with each strike; for a moment she tried to scream, to call out that it was all a plot, that I had bribed witnesses, that the world had made a clever play. She begged.
"Stop! Please! I am—" she cried.
Her voice implored. Her words were the sequence I had expected and prepared for: smugness melted into shock, then denial, bargaining, and finally pleading. The crowd watched, a hundred hands holding phones of the mind's eye, a thousand eyes on a woman who had once been above reproach.
"See," I said quietly. "These are the people you used to stand before. You have asked for their mouths to be closed when you made your moves. Today, their mouths are open."
Faces reacted in a hungering discord. Some wept. A few shouted for blood. Others recorded with fingers on prayer beads — the memory of injustice to be kept.
As the flogging ended, they threw the cloak of titles off of her shoulders. She was a woman without silk and without name. When she was made to kneel, the scene achieved a clarity only the worst of tragedies grants: a mighty fall so public no rumor could find a hiding place.
She crawled on the ground and finally, for all her begging, pressed her forehead to the earth. "Please," she whispered. "I didn't mean—"
The crowd had moved on from anger to a complex mix of horror and satisfaction. A woman near me took out a handkerchief and dabbed the corners of her eyes; a young soldier clapped both hands over his mouth as if the sight had broken him.
She begged. She pleaded. She offered the names of others, offered anything to make the whip stop. The cycle played out: someone in the crowd shouted, some took photos, and some applauded as mercy was meted now that the public's appetite had been satisfied. Baltasar Olson stood with a face like weathered stone. Miles looked older.
When it was done, the herald pronounced the sentence again so no one could forget, and the crowd turned to return to their lives. The favored lay in a wet cluster of humiliation, which to some was cold comfort and to others a deep sorrow for the world being so easily broken.
Afterwards, people walked away in their small clusters, talking about whether cruelty always finds its own. Men passed offerings to the guards who had enforced the law. Women exchanged gossip that had suddenly become fact. Some cried for Lily; some whispered for Franklin Weber. The square smelled of dust and the strange sweetness of justice when it is at last given.
I stood and watched until the shadows lengthened.
When they were gone, Miles found me. He looked old and a little ashamed. "You won," he said, in a voice that wanted to be gentle.
"I never wanted this," I replied. "I wanted Lily back."
"Do you hate me?" he asked, and the question was small and huge all at once.
"I don't know," I said. "I want a world where people are honest, and I want you to be a man who kept your promises."
He tried to reply and the words twisted on him. He left without much more than a bow. Later that night, in my cold room, I saw a paper on my table. Baltasar had sent me a single line: "Your father’s honor will be restored in the scrolls." It was not everything, but it was something.
Time did not fix the hole in my chest. Time gave me a different work: to protect those who remained and to change the law so that no favored could create a court of whispers again. I insisted on committee reforms. I insisted on an inquiry that was open and transparent so that no one could again build a scaffold in the dark and call it justice.
Oceane's punishment was the beginning of my slow revenge, which was not blood but daylight. People would not be able to say easily that the cold wing was a place to hide cruelty. They watched the square and learned the sound of truth.
Weeks later, a public scroll was read: the name Franklin Weber was cleared of the forged accusations in a statement that balanced the scales, even if too late. Miles denounced the false evidence. The court proclaimed punishment for the conspirators. "Justice," they said, as if it had been a sudden thing rather than the work of many small hands pulling at the rope.
"Will this bring them back?" someone asked me, meaning Lily, meaning my father, meaning the life we had lost.
"No," I said. "But it means what comes next will never be as blind."
When they asked me, later, to sit at a table where the senate forged law and to promise reforms, I said yes. I said yes because grief can be a cruel teacher, but it can also demand better. I said yes because I knew that being small in the face of power is not a reason to loosen your grip.
The palace is still full of laughter and banners and brightness. I have learned to stand under it with my own small light. Once, many years ago, I loved a man who used courthouses like toys. Now I love justice.
"Delaney," Lily's voice often echoes in my memory, softer than any living sound. "Do not become what you hate."
I keep that memory in my pocket like a coin; sometimes I press it to my lips when the rooms feel too cold.
The courtyard where Oceane was stripped of title, the square where Lily was remembered, the scaffold where my father was taken — they are all places with the same stamp now: apology and warning. A line has been drawn.
When the wind comes through the palace, it carries with it not just the laughter of high festivals but also the small, steady beats of the people who now know that if they have a voice, and if they will use it, the most favored among them will not be able to twist the world without being seen.
The End
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